To improve mathematics scores, Ontario should take a look at China and Singapore, which have the world’s top student math scores.

Teacher math camp this summer is just part of a big push in Mississauga to boost student math achievement.

By:Irvin Studin Published on Thu Aug 28 2014

A great society with excessive fixity in its ideas and ways can quickly lose its greatness. And so we have the paradox of much of today’s Canada, where unprecedented demographic diversity often yields the paradoxical result of great conformity and orthodoxy in political and policy thinking.

Witness the growing concern about Ontario students’ math scores, which has been met with a host of aggressive, but altogether predictable policy initiatives from the province’s boards of education — more math literacy for teachers; more parental support; technology, etc. The one transformational, but rather obvious, initiative absent from this mix is to put real mathematicians — graduates of proper university math programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels — into our classrooms from the earliest grades. Pay these mathematicians well for their craft and watch the test scores skyrocket.

For just as we would not fancy our children taking piano lessons from a guitarist or chess lessons from a hockey player, so we should imagine that teaching our children how to think about numbers, shapes and all species of mathematical relationships should be left primarily to those who dream about numbers and can teach our children to so dream. Teaching one plus two may seem tediously easy, but mathematicians can teach our children to see such operations in exceptional, even entertaining ways, drawing connections that are inaccessible to those without proper training.

If we have not figured this out, which societies have? Let’s start with China and Singapore, the countries with the leading student math scores in the world. Question: when was the last time that any Canadian political leader — federal, provincial or municipal — dared to publicly suggest that Canada could learn anything policy-related from China? Answer: Woe betide the first to do so.

But why should this be? Are we somehow a superior society? I doubt it. And yet, seeking policy lessons from nearly any country other than the United States and, in extremis, Great Britain (for the daring) is so far out of the policy imagination of the majority of our political classes that we fail to realize how far we fall behind by virtue of tagging our comparative universe to the wrong ship. In other words, if the U.S., for all its multi-headed excellence, is behind in a huge number of policy areas, how far behind must we be? Are we even aware of this lag? And how can we remedy it if our mental map is so unpromiscuous?

In health care, for example, our obsession with our superior public insurance coverage by juxtaposition with only the U.S. obscures the general mediocrity of our system — a system that fails to break the top 20 in serious global rankings. Why don’t we look at Singapore or Japan or even France (often ranked No. 1)? In infrastructure, the Chinese have built high-speed rail across their entire eastern seaboard over the last decade — a stunning achievement that makes us look downright sleepy and provincial. Where will our first high-speed rail line be built? If the Chinese have overbuilt, then we have surely underbuilt. But can we not take lessons?

In foreign policy, our concepts and doctrines are colonized exclusively by American ideas — even where our interests surely differ. After all, we are all reading the same books, newspapers, magazines and blogs — almost all American or Anglo-American, and mostly in English. Under our current government in Ottawa, for all their good intentions, we have adopted the neo-conservative slogans and dogma of the early 2000s, only to find ourselves 10 years behind the Americans in our thinking (and even further behind the Chinese, Singaporeans, Australians and Israelis), but without the resources, and, frankly, without the talent. To the rest of the world, this all looks strange indeed.

If the Meiji reformers of Japan could take to the U.S. and the European continent in the 19th century for two years to learn about reforms in law, economics, military affairs and public administration, and if the Australians of the late 20th century could adopt from the former U.S.S.R. a democratized version of an elite sports system, then surely Canada in the early 21st century could regularly stand up commissions in education, health care, cities, sports, public administration, social and foreign policy to travel the world — but really the entire world — to promiscuously adopt the very best lessons and practices in the game.

Of course, this means having an open mind to societies and countries that really do not at all “think like us” — an intellectual block in today’s Canada that surely must be surmounted, not just because our own thinking may not always be best, but because the opposite course bespeaks the closing of the democratic (and mathematical) mind where in theory such a mind should always be open.

Irvin Studin is Editor-in-Chief of Global Brief magazine and President of the Institute for 21st Century Questions, a strategy and vision thinktank launching this fall. He keynotes at the New Canada Conference in P.E.I. this weekend, marking the 150th anniversary of the Charlottetown Conference.

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